These Hackers Are Writing a Program to End All Hacking

By
PC Mag ME TeamMarch 8, 2016, 3 p.m.

If there's a holy grail of computer hacking, it might be what the seven teams of computer scientists participating in the final round of DARPA's Cyber Grand Challenge are seeking. They're attempting to write an autonomous program that can find security holes in software before malicious attackers can exploit them.

The Cyber Grand Challenge, started in 2013, bills itself as the "world's first all-machine hacking tournament." Security vulnerabilities are expensive, and DARPA hasn't been afraid to reach for its checkbook. It gave each of the seven recently announced finalists $750,000 for successfully finishing a capture-the-flag style preliminary round. The winner of the entire competition, which ends later this year, will take home $2 million.

In order to be selected as the winner, a team's systems must autonomously create network defenses, deploy patches and mitigations, monitor the network, and evaluate the defenses of competitors. It's a tall order, but the competitors are formidable, including one team that completed the first round in just six hours.

The teams hail from around the world; there's no citizenship requirement even though the competition is funded by the U.S. military. Among them are professors and students from UC Berkeley and the University of Idaho, as well as a group of French, British, and American security researchers who met as students at UC Santa Barbara.

The final round will take place in August at the DEF CON security conference in Las Vegas. The competition will be live streamed, though as participant Giovanni Vigna noted, real-life hackers aren't nearly as exciting as Hollywood portrayals.

"Hacking is usually just a bunch of guys around a table who are very tired just typing on a laptop," Vigna told The Guardian.